An old friend from Nevada who has subscribed to the Monitor for 50
years is upset because she has been reading my memos here on how "Saddam
Hussein did not gas his own people," and read your May 13 report about
how he did commit genocide by gassing lots and lots of Iraqi Kurds. She asked
me to resolve the differences, which I can do by tackling your key assertion:
"The New York-based group Human Rights Watch, after a three-year
investigation of 18 tons of captured Iraqi documents, forensic examination of
several mass graves, and hundreds of eyewitness accounts, concludes of the
1988 campaign: 'The Iraqi regime committed the crime of genocide.'"

Human Rights Watch, which I have been talking to about this, sticks to that
assertion, but its case no longer holds together. There were two instances
when gassing of the Iraqi Kurds was alleged to have taken place by the Iraqi
military: At Halabja in March 1988 near the Iranian border and in August 1988
at the end of the Iran/Iraq war. HRW now concedes that Halabja was caught
between the Iranian and Iraqi armies AFTER the Iranian army drove the Iraqi
garrison out of town. The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency concluded
that Iran used a cyanide-based gas and Iraq used mustard gas to drive them
out. There is some question as to how Iraq deployed the gas, from the air or
by mortar. The Army War College tells me the 4.2" mortar was originally
developed by the United States specifically to project chemical
weapons. In any case, Mr. Peterson, you can see that there was no
"genocide" involved at Halabja, simply civilians caught in a
crossfire. You mention that Iraq killed 5,000 at Halabja, but I'm told this
seems wildly inflated, as contemporaneous reports of reporters coming on the
scene after the battle told of seeing "scores" of dead in the
streets.

It is true that Iraq would have committed "genocide" if your report
was correct that Saddam Hussein ordered all Iraqi Kurdish men between the ages
of 18 and 55 killed in that summer of 1988, before the war ended in August.
But Iraqi Kurds, officers, volunteers and conscripts, fought in the war
against Iran, constituting roughly 15% of the total Iraqi military. The
100,000 Kurds you say were slaughtered by Iraq prior to the end of the war in
the "Anfal campaign" were never found, to this day. Human Rights
Watch originally said they believed in the assertions of Secretary of State
George Shultz and Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer Peter Galbraith
that some number of this magnitude were gassed. Now HRW tells me it agrees
that Shultz and Galbraith were in error.... and that this number of Kurds were
rounded up by special Iraqi defense units, taken south of Kurdistan, killed by
automatic weapons fire, and buried in mass graves. HRW refers to the 100,000
"disappeared," as do you in the Monitor.

The only "mass graves" discovered to date is actually one "mass
grave" of 12 bodies, which HRW acknowledges were political prisoners who
for some reason were executed. There is certainly no question that at the end
of the war, the Iraqi army went into Kurdistan to deal with those rebel groups
that were aiding the Iranian army. HRW says the mass graves of the 100,000
cannot be found because the bodies were taken out of Kurdistan and buried in
areas under Iraqi control. This implicitly acknowledges that they did not die
of gassing in the north, as it would not be credible that they were piled onto
trucks for shipment and burial south.

Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, co-author of the Army War College report, believes
that Joost Hiltermann, the principle researcher of Human Rights Watch on this
issue, does not seem aware that at the end of the war with Iraq, Baghdad
ordered a strip of land cleared all along the border with Iran. This meant the
people in the villages along the border had to be razed and their residents
"relocated" to locations 50 miles from the border. That is, the
"disappeared" were not buried in mass graves but placed in new
locations, some in high-rise apartments. The "tons" of documents
that supposedly show men, women and children "arrested" by the Army
and sent off to extermination were actually lists of the people relocated. The
foreign press was invited in at the time to witness the process and there were
many accounts of the relocation. Human Rights Watch now seems to think these
were the Kurds who were exterminated. Dr. Pelletiere, the former CIA
intelligence officer who covered the Iran/Iraq war, says it amounts to a
"hoax."

I've been dubious about all this "genocide" reporting from the
start, Mr. Peterson, because it was not taken seriously by the U.S. government
until Iraq invaded Kuwait two years later. Because there was little support
for the United States to commit itself to kicking Saddam out of Kuwait, it
became necessary to "demonize" him with a propaganda effort. The
"gassing" of the Kurds was convenient and at hand. Because so many
little pieces of your Monitor report mention "facts" that are
not fact and appeared earlier in Jeffrey Goldberg's New Yorker piece on
the same subject, I must assume that you decided all this must be true and
made a good story of your readers. You really should take the trouble of
thinking through why there have been no Kurdish soldiers who fought for Iraq
have come forward to confirm what Saddam did to their people. Yes, if they
were ordered to gas their relatives and friends and refused to do so, they
would have been executed themselves, but it has been many years since
Kurdistan has been outside Baghdad's control. Surely they would be able to
come forward now and confess to the "genocide" and lead
international observers to the "mass graves."

I'm still open to arguments in support of the genocide thesis, because our
President and Vice President seem to believe in it, and are using it as a
basis for threatening another military action against Iraq. I wish you would
take another look at these points. The Village Voice interviewed
Jeffrey Goldberg after his New Yorker piece appeared and asked him why
he did not confront the War College/DIA report. He said he did not because the
findings of Human Rights Watch seemed to be conclusive.